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Monday, February 6, 2012

Whirlwind of a Weekend and some Big News!

So much transpired this weekend, I feel like I don't even know what happened. I know I usually do my 1000 gifts updates on Mondays, but I'll try to do that later this week when I have a little more time to think.

Anyway, over the course of this weekend I...

...spent Friday shadowing a speech pathologist in the school where I sub and I loved it!

...Became a bridesmaid for my friend Lindsey's wedding! I'm so excited. she was in my wedding,too! And she asked me in the cutest way:

...attended a birthday party and a Super Bowl party where I got to see and hold lots of cute babies

...Watched my cousin's baby take some of his first steps.

oh, and there was one other tiny thing too:

... We ripped out a wall in our house and spent hours upon hours this weekend cleaning and working on renovations. Because...

...WE'RE MOVING!!

See? Whirlwind. Where are we moving, you ask? Right downstairs in the same house we live in now.

If you're new around here, I'll give you the "Reader's Digest" version of our home story. Right after we got married we had the opportunity to buy a house that has three apartments in it. My grandma lives in the back one, we live in the top one, and we had renters in the bottom one. A great situation for us.

If you'll remember about a week or so ago, I wrote about how we had a big need and I was trusting God to meet it. Well, the need was that our downstairs renters had the opportunity to buy a relative's home, so they moved out.

So then we had some decisions to make. When we first bought the house in October of 2008, we really wanted to move into the bottom floor. Call me crazy, but I didn't love the idea of walking up 20 + steps every time I needed to enter my house. Especially with groceries! However, when we bought the house, there were already renters in both downstairs apartments, but not upstairs. And the upstairs needed the most work. So it made sense for us to move up there and fix it up while we lived there.

But now that the downstairs is available, it's our chance to fill it and rent out the upstairs apartment (which has been newly renovated by us).

It would have probably been easier for us to just rent out the downstairs apartment. But Luke and I just couldn't resist the challenge of fixing it up, and making it the perfect, cozy home for ourselves.

So here's a quick pros and cons list for moving:

Pros:

~I can park in the front by the entrance, and I don't have to walk up all those steps

~We now can use the huge, wrap-around porch!! I keep picturing myself out on a porch swing in the summer sipping sweet iced tea, or barbecuing out there with friends.

~You guys, there's a FIRE PLACE. A dream of mine has always been to have a fire place in the living room. It isn't exactly in working order at the moment, but Luke assures me we can make it work.

~ The living room is huge and open and has beautiful windows. And we made it huger this weekend when we removed a wall. Because we're crazy.

~ It has high ceilings, and I can't wait to get a bigger Christmas tree.

~ Huge bedroom with more beautiful windows.

~ Bigger kitchen

~ A tiny bedroom that would be perfect for a cute little nursery

~Direct access to the huge basement (Living upstairs we always had to go outside to get to the basement).

Cons:

~Even though the rooms are bigger, we are actually losing a lot of square footage

~It will be kind of a weird layout, as our bedroom will be right next to the kitchen. We are no strangers to weird layouts though, so it should be okay.

~ I won't have same-floor laundry anymore, and I'll have to go to the basement for that.

~Extremely reduced storage space. there are only three small closets on the first floor compared to the massive closets in every room upstairs. However,it will be helpful that we'll have direct access to the basement. And Luke is already talking about building a wardrobe for the bedroom.

~ Smaller bathroom

~It will be a lot of work. Luke and I really do enjoy this kind of work though (or else we never would have bought such an old house) so this won't be so bad. The areas that will need the most work are the kitchen and the bathroom. And we also ripped most of the carpet out. The carpet was glued on top of beautiful hardwood floor, just like in our hallway upstairs. So we are litterally scraping the glue off by hand. Because, again, we are crazy.

Glue-scraping progress after about 4 hours. See? Crazy.

I feel like we have just started another chapter of our lives! Posting may be sporadic in the next few weeks as we're renovating and moving and I'm also juggling classes, homework, and substitute teaching. But blogging is my outlet, so I bet I'll still be posting at least a few times a week :-)